Obama praises Smith Electric Vehicles, stimulus it’s received

President Obama on Thursday visited Smith Electric Vehicles U.S. Corp. in Kansas City, a fledgling company that assembles battery-powered, all-electric commercial vehicles.

The company, which opened its first plant last year, has received $32 million in U.S. Department of Energy grants, which it matched with $36 million of its own to help build 500 all-electric delivery trucks for firms such as Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay. The grants came from $2.4 billion in stimulus money set aside to encourage development of electric vehicles.

For Obama, standing in front of a bucket truck assembled for Kansas City Power & Light Co., it was a prime stage from which to address the attempts his administration has made to bolster the nation’s economic recovery, as well as to discuss the importance of investing in alternative energy. He spoke to a crowd of SEV employees and their families — roughly 100 people.

“One of those decisions was to provide critical funding to promising, innovative businesses like Smith Electric,” Obama said, according to a transcript. “And because we did, there is a thriving enterprise here instead of an empty, darkened warehouse. Because of the grant that went to this company, we can hear the sounds of machines humming and people doing their jobs, instead of the quiet of an empty building where the workers were laid off long ago.”

The facility SEV inhabited formerly was an American Airlines maintenance base at Kansas City International Airport (Airport code: MCI). American Airlines said in October that it would shut down the base, which employed about 490.

SEV is on track to employ about 70 people. Its vehicles cost $150,000 each, can carry as much as 16,000 pounds and have a range of 100 miles on a single charge.

“We were guided by a simple idea,” Obama said. “Government doesn’t have all the answers. And it cannot generate the jobs or growth we need by itself. But government can lay the foundation for small businesses to expand and hire, for entrepreneurs to open up shop and test new products, for workers to get the training they need, and for families to achieve some measure of economic security.”